That seems like a fairly simple question on the surface, and – in many senses – it actually is fairly simple, with fairly simple answers. You have to think it through a little bit to actually get to that simplistic core, however.

Call me crazy, or even curmudgeonly, but I figure if you’re going compare something to Second Life (or compare Second Life to something else) you should at least have some idea about what Second Life actually is.

So, a big and controversial story circulating at the moment is a study by Aptiquant, where 100,000 people were invited to take an online IQ test, and their results correlated with the make and model of Web-browser that they were using. The results played into popular prejudices, indicating that users of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 had IQs in the ‘moron’ range.

A juicy story indeed, with graphs and charts and all-sorts. Except that it took less than one minute to determine that the company behind the study, Aptiquant, doesn’t appear to exist.

Valleywag, an online gossip (and occasionally news) blog operated by Gawker Media – and given to outlandish and sensationalist headlines, rather like the one above – was always fond of calling Second Life a failure, in the past tense; it’s dead, it was a failure, does anyone remember that crazy thing with all those sad people?

Now, just relegated to a simple blog tag, Valleywag has all but given up the ghost, whereas Second Life does rather continue to be ticking along, regardless of its various problems and obstacles.